ISRG

security

Stands for: Internet Security Research Group

The nonprofit that runs Let's Encrypt.

Internet Security Research Group is the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt, whose ISRG Root X1 certificate anchors the free, automated certificates that a large share of the web now uses.

ISRG is the non-profit that runs Let's Encrypt, and its achievement is not the certificate authority but the automation. ACME made issuance a machine-to-machine protocol, which turned a manual annual purchase into something a server does for itself every sixty days.

That single change is most of the reason HTTPS went from a minority of web traffic to nearly all of it. The side effects are the interesting part: certificates stopped signalling legitimacy, because anyone can get one in seconds, and short lifetimes made revocation less critical while making automation mandatory. A site that cannot renew automatically now has an outage on a timer, which is a different operational risk from the one the old model carried.

Also known as: isrg

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